


Haifisch

by VictorSinister



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amputation, Backstory, Blood, Gen, Gore, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, cannibalism mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 12:30:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7361566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictorSinister/pseuds/VictorSinister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Butchery and emergency surgery aren't too different when you're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haifisch

**Author's Note:**

> Serious disturbing content warning for amputation, blood and gore, mentions of cannibalism, and implied mental illness and PTSD.
> 
> Haifisch is German for ‘shark’. I first thought of the idea for this fic while I was listening to the Rammstein song of the same name.
> 
> On Roadhog’s mutations; my headcanon is that eating and handling irradiated human meat caused overgrowth similar to real life gigantism.

Roadhog thought he’d got used to the size of his hands. Apparently, he hadn’t. Slippery with blood, his thick fingers had felt too heavy and slow to wrap the rags tight enough. In the end, he’d just twisted and pulled the material until the bleeding stopped.

It worked. Junkrat was still alive, limp across the big man’s lap. His eyes were open and he was breathing, but he wasn’t quite there. He couldn’t be, not silent and still like this.

“You’re not dead.” _Right?_

It took far too long for Junkrat to reply. He blinked, took a few shuddering breaths. The stump of his arm twitched. Finally, he croaked “No. Don’t think so. What did I… what’s gone?”

“Right hand, right foot. You’ll live.” Roadhog couldn’t say it with any measure of comfort. It was what it was.

A soft giggle erupted from the broken body in his lap. “It was gonna happen sooner or later. Better with you around to save my arse.” Junkrat groaned and lifted his head to look at his wounds. “Wow, that’s weird.” He raised his right arm, turning the sheared lump of meat around in front of his face.

“Stop it,” Roadhog grunted, shoving Junkrat’s arm back down. The man was in shock, and mad already, but the callousness of his reaction was somehow annoying. “We’ve got to move.”

“No.” Slowly, he curled his fingers around Roadhog’s thumb. His hand was ice cold. Blood loss. “That’s got to go. Won’t heal.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the remains of his leg. The wound wasn’t a clean break like his arm, it was a charred mass of shredded flesh. “I know you know how to do it.”

Roadhog tried to say ‘no’, but it didn’t come out right, and he shook his head instead. He choked down the rising panic, blinked back his blurring vision behind the safety of his mask. “Th-they’ll deal with it, I can’t. They’ll clean it up.”

“Ah, you lied to me, you’re not qualified,” Junkrat teased, squeezing his bodyguard’s hand. “Said you sold people meat.”

“No, I… I’m not…” Roadhog’s voice had faded to a indistinct rumble. He wasn’t Roadhog the Butcher, not anymore.

He was Mako, his dad’s sweet little boy, who’d felt sorry for the little fish in the nets and cried whe he’d first seen a shark caught, hung up with a hook through its tail.  _We’ve got to make a living_ , his dad had said. They’d followed the ocean as it dried up, and fishing yields became too small to make money from, then too small to live on. At least they’d had some sort of food then, before radiation destroyed the land. There was no shortage of dead bodies, though, in the years that passed.

Mako had cried when he first hung up a corpse. But he had to make a living.

It had changed him. Physically and mentally, he’d grown a foot taller and couldn’t look at an injured person without reducing them to their component parts. He didn’t want to see the only bright, living thing in this dead land as meat.

Junkrat let him sit with his thoughts for several long moments. It was impossible to know how much he’d figured out about Roadhog’s past, if he’d pieced together the braggadocio, the drunken rants, and the nightmares. He didn’t push for an answer and, finally, Roadhog was able to cough up a lame excuse. “Don’t wanna hurt you any more.”

Smiling, with tears gleaming in his eyes, Junkrat whispered “It’s okay. Can’t feel anythin’. Better do it while I’m in shock, right?”

He had a good point. Outback medicine wasn’t the best, anaesthetics were dangerous and expensive, and a lot of people relied on nitrous oxide. It worked for stitches, but it wouldn’t do much to dull the pain of someone hacking through a limb.

“Try not to remember this. Please.” Roadhog eased Junkrat off his lap and on to the sand. He turned his back to conceal the grisly view, then drew his knife and clamped his hand around the last solid part of the minced leg, just below the tourniquet. The flesh was cold and clammy, still oozing blood. It was both a blessing and a curse that the movements of cleanly butchering a human limb were muscle memory by now, he didn’t need to think but that in itself was frightening. He turned the blade upwards, slid it under Junkrat’s leg, and dragged it through skin and muscle. A circular stroke severed the meat from the bone in one movement. He’d never cut a limb that was meant to heal, but instinct told him that the remaining flesh would need to be folded over the femur, so he pulled it back to reveal more white bone. Junkrat had hardly reacted so far, but when the first blow of the knife struck his bare femur, he twitched and pressed his hand against Roadhog’s back.

That would have had to hurt like hell, and reverberated through his whole body. Mako remembered how even little fish jerked when their tails were chopped off. He felt sick, and knew he’d never be able to eat anything with a brain again.

One more strike. Junkrat cried out, spasmed inward into a little ball, but he’d left the awful red jelly lump of his right lower leg behind.

Mako recoiled too, rolling on to his side and ripping off his mask. He had to breathe clear air, without the stink of sweat and rubber, before he threw up or passed out. The images of flesh and bone still glowed in his brain like burning embers, and he couldn’t shake them out.

He wanted to run. He didn’t want to return to the broken man in the bloody sand. When he did, he didn’t bother to put his mask back on. He didn’t think he’d need to, Junkrat would be unconscious by now. Should be.

Instead, unfocused eyes met his, in a sooty face streaked with tears. Mako was frozen as Junkrat reached up with two hands, one that wasn’t actually there.

“Who are you? What’s wrong?” he murmured, stroking Mako’s face. The bony protrusions from the big man’s jaw didn’t scare him, and he touched scarred and healthy skin without distinction. “You’re crying.”


End file.
